Assessment of vine development according to available water resources by using remote sensing in La Mancha, Spain

Abstract The relevance of growing vines under semiarid conditions is universally accepted because of its impacts on social, economic and environmental aspects. Improving the knowledge of the soil–plant–atmosphere system related to the expression of vine growth allows the study of vine cover in wide areas. Several aspects of vine growing under semiarid conditions, related to weather, soil, and plant cover are analysed in this paper. Once the ground truth is achieved, multitemporal studies by remote sensing are especially useful for vine growth monitoring. The purpose of this work is focussed on determining changes of vine cover development according to available water resources in relation to present remote sensing methods. The method is based on using multitemporal masking classification techniques based on the ground truth knowledge achieved during previous research.